I think that Joss Whedon’s biggest problem isn’t so much, per Matt Yglesias, greed and/or an unwillingness to work for cable. Rather, it’s that Whedon was born too early, before the economics and artistic potential of long-form television ultimately align.

When moving pictures were first invented, they would literally just film theater productions, a static camera observing a stage like a member of the audience. Then people like Eisenstein came along and film developed a rich grammar all its own. But the underlying dramatic structure stayed fairly constant. It’s not a coincidence that full-length plays and movies still run about the same length and movie scripts still tend to be divided into “acts.” People can only absorb so much in one sitting and drama as an art form has been around for millennia.

Similarly, television drama evolved from radio drama which had evolved from theater. Episodes tended to be self-contained, which fit the established forms and made it easier to sell re-runs in syndication.  If you flipped on an episode of Magnum, P.I. it didn’t really matter which season it came from because every episode had a beginning, middle and end. It wasn’t until the ’80s and shows like Hill Street Blues that television began taking advantage of the one resource that plays and films lack in abundance: time.

You can only do so much in an hour or two or three. Settings, characters, and conflicts have to be established and plots advanced at a rapid pace. 60 or 100 hours, by contrast, is a whole different situation. That much time allows for long, multi-layered narratives, huge casts of characters, digressions and discursions, explorations of complex ideas and themes. At that length, you’re not filming a play anymore. You’re filming a novel. Joss Whedon’s problem is that the rational economics of filmed novels have yet to arrive.

Written novels, after all, are cheap to produce. All it takes is months or perhaps several years of one person’s time, plus pen and paper or a laptop computer.  With the exception of a handful of blockbuster authors, novels are also cheap from the publisher’s standpoint–advances tend to be modest, with the mutual understanding that publishers and author will profit if the novel happens to be a success. Publishers can survive if most of their books don’t sell, as most don’t, because they didn’t cost much up-front. Indeed, a lot of novels are written on spec–think Stephen King writing “Carrie” while working in an industrial laundromat.

Televised novels, by contrast, cost millions of dollars to produce. They’re also essentially collaborative. The authors of novels have absolute control over the worlds they create. Television showrunners work with directors, writers, actors, and scores of other people whose efforts contribute to the quality of end product. Because they’re so expensive, producers can’t wait until televised novels are finished before they start selling them. They have to release them in chapters, which means the authors of televised novels are denied the crucial opportunity to revise. Michael Chabon, one of the best novelists alive, spent a year writing a complete 600-page novel featuring the characters and settings of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, decided it wasn’t good enough, and wrote a whole new book. In television today, that could never occur.

All of which creates problems for people like Joss Whedon. The circumstances under which a television producer and/or network will give someone the money and artistic freedom to create an artistically uncompromised televised novel are pretty rare. In order to get the millions of dollars needed to make one, you have to be able to sell it to a lot of people. And that usually means appealing to the tastes that a lot of people have. If you want to make something better than Heroes, your options start to narrow pretty fast. Or you need to be lucky enough to end up in a position where someone’s willing to lose money on your behalf, which doesn’t happen all that often. The WB didn’t mind that Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer got lousy ratings in 1997 because all of its shows were getting lousy ratings back then and it was willing to lose money in order to build a catalogue and brand. David Simon only got HBO to back The Wire at the height of the network’s early-Sopranos hubris and power, and even then it was touch and go getting it renewed. Those kinds of circumstances don’t always come along. Indeed, it’s  been seven years since “The Wire” first demonstrated the full potential of the televised novel, and nobody has attempted anything as artistically ambitious since.

Whedon also suffers from the inability to revise. The main concept of Dollhouse came to him in a flash, during a long lunch conversation with Eliza Dushku. At the time, I’m sure he didn’t know exactly why it was worthy of a long TV series. I imagine his gut just told him it was fertile territory to explore, just like Chabon thought–correctly–that a hard-boiled detective novel set in an alternate-universe Jewish homeland in Alaska would make a great book. But he had to actually write the book–two books, in fact–to find out for sure. All of Whedon’s shows start slowly and then gather narrative and conceptual momentum in the second season. Buffy, Angel, and Firefly also had a few first-season clunker episodes that would have ended up tucked away unseen in a prose novelist’s hard drive or filing cabinet drawer.

Televised novels need a different economic model. One avenue is reducing the millions of dollars cost to a manageable size. Another is selling direct to consumers. Whedon himself took steps in both directions with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, which he produced on digital video without studio resources during the recent writer’s strike and sold via iTunes, with actors getting paid on the back end. This seems promising. I know for a fact that Dollhouse wasn’t sold to consumers in the most economically profit-maximizing way possible because I got it for free via broadcast television and Hulu and I would have paid more than free to watch it, even with ads.

Which makes me think this problem will get solved. Dollhouse reportedly cost about $1 million an episode to produce. Let’s say you need to pull in twice that to make it worth everyone’s while. You’d only need 400,000 people paying $5.00 an episode. There are 6.8 billion people in the world, several million of whom are already Dollhouse viewers. Indeed, it’s not that Fox was losing tons of money on Dollhouse; they just decided they could make more money allocating the very limited resource of an hour of primetime network television to another show. As broadband telecommunications moves inexorably toward universal and inexpensive, limitations like that will disappear. I just hope Joss Whedon is still around to make great televised novels when it occurs.